-
8. Indifferent Love
- Indiana University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Iturn now to consider certain of Friedrich Schelling’s thoughts on love. He developed one of the most persistent notions of indifference in our philosophical tradition, and his thought picks up especially a Pythagorean strain that is embedded in the Platonic lineage. In that lineage Pythagorean images and hopes have exercised considerable power in the formation of some aspects of European and American spirituality. I have chosen Schelling because he knew that indifference is a pervasive aspect of differentiation , and he learned by severe experience that it defies the best systematic impulses in Western metaphysics. In fact, for Schelling indifference and love find their numbing coherence in their differentiation, in what he called their purity and what I prefer to call their freedom. Schelling’s thought, he says, is “an image of inner spirit” that emerged out of his body. When taken on his terms, his thought composes a “circulation between the corporeal and the spiritual,” a transfiguring process that is moved by his soul’s love for what is highest in its own powers and moved as well by a profound compassion for the corporeality that undergoes the transformation (62, 248).1 His thinking carries out a process of liberation, ages old, a process that all of nature lusts after and resists, a process that liberates lust in a transformation into love; his thought embodies the corpoEIGHT Indifferent Love This chapter is a reading of selected parts of the 1815 version of Schelling’s The Ages of the World. I will not attempt a comprehensive summary of this work or a comparative study of its ideas in relation to other texts. I find that Schelling’s thought, as I engage it, requires that I differentiate myself as a thinker from it, and this discussion comprises a work of such differentiation as I encounter his thoughts on indifference in this fragmented and forceful essay on God’s life. 1. I will give the page numbers for citations in the text. The first number will reference Schelling’s The Ages of the World, trans. Jason M. Wirth (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000). The second page number references Schellings sämtlicheWerke, ed. K. F. A. Schelling (Stuttgart-Augsburg: J. G. Cotta, 1856–61). real sacrifices that figure the soul’s rising to its spiritual destiny. As Schelling thinks with systematic discipline, he, in the imagery of his thinking, begins to fade out. God’s self-enactment is given disclosive space. The dynamic system composes the soul’s movement and thus God’s movement, composes a power of life that means the unity of everything. This thought in its discipline moves with an indifference of love that, like a shock of unexpected ecstasy, takes people from themselves, in a sense diminishes them to insignificance , and brings them with alertness to a region of life where their souls, in the soul’s vast difference from a particular individual, feel at home, articulately at home, creatively and expressly at home: In his system’s movement , Schelling comes before a vast difference from himself. If he can serve the soul well, his system of thought will say what is true, say the truth even in the particular system’s failure, like just persons are able to show justice even in their injustices and in their suffering injustice. Schelling will show himself to have failed, but the system’s expression will have shown the ground of his failure, will have given him cause to celebrate a cloudy presentation of an unimaginable purity of connections, unified by necessity’s freedom and defined by indifferent love. I would like to consider Schelling’s conceptual image of love-withindifference . If my preceding observations are accurate, this image of indifferent love will not only figure the soul’s love. It will also figure the transformed desire (above I said lust) of nature and the faceless, incomprehensible indifference not only of the soul’s joining force but also of pure divinity beyond God, “a devouring force of purity,” a force of simple and thoroughgoing neutrality, equi-valence. In its imagery and particular difference, his thought, of course, will fail. His articles, “a” and “the,” will suggest determinate difference where he knows there is none, for example. And the particular corporeality and specific organizing power of his articulation will make impossible a full expression of his soul’s movement and of the ungrounding ground of this movement. But his failure might also give flashes of intuition. It might intensify alertness...